A pale sky sprawled above the woods and over a beaten road that wound through them. In times long past, the road’s main function had been to reach an oil drilling facility, but now it was purposeless, dilapidated, and rarely saw traffic. At this particular moment, only one car was running anywhere along it.
The car reflected the paleness of the sky as a perfect mirror. Inside it was Sal Benno, and the only reason he came this way was the supposed road repair obstructing his typical path home from work, to which his vehicle’s automated assistant had alerted him. Sal wearily contemplated the luck he would now need to be asleep before afternoon.
He continued over potholes as fast as he dared for about ten minutes. All at once, the trees melted away on both sides of him and he was driving on a bridge. Sal actually jolted slightly in his seat. It was as if he had long held a traced version of this image in his mind’s eye and was now finally matching it up against the real thing.
The bridge extended the length of this thinner part of the forest, about a hundred feet, and it curved to the left. Underneath the bridge, perpendicular to it, a trickle of a stream ran. The trees that grew near it were much younger, suggesting that it had once been a voluminous river. Sal couldn’t see them inside his car, but he knew that large drainpipes – big enough to walk through – were built into the bridge’s foundation.
As quickly as he had come upon the bridge, he drove right back into the woods. Yet now, memories overwhelmed Sal, with a cascading effect; a section of his brain, unused for years, had reengaged.
He was young again, no more than eight, and roaming the woods with his friends. They followed a broadly circular trail that no one ever seemed to use, stopping at every point of interest along the path, and deviating from it in calculated capacities. Taking a plunge into the depths of the woods was a weekly ritual. Sal’s best friend Emmett, Sam, and Katy who called him Salvatore – they all could have met up any day of the week in the summer, and sometimes they did, but sheepishly because of Ciara, who could only come when she was at her dad’s on weekends. Each Saturday earned a particular identity, a title. The Day of Contests, the Day of Rumors, the War of the Forest, Operation Stay or Pay, and the future always, inevitably, seemed to yield another christening. As far as their parents knew, Sal and his friends were venturing nowhere near as deep into the woods as they were, and the area was already largely unpopulated, so they never ran into other people.
Emmett, as the de facto leader of the group, made sure each Saturday was a conquest. The other four had all met through him. Sam was blond-haired, reserved, and eloquent beyond his years. He jokingly pretended to be Sal sometimes, due only to the similarity of their nicknames. Katy’s ingenuity in matters of the imagination made her indispensable to the group’s games. When they were alone together, Sal and Katy would stand still and look into each other’s eyes for great lengths of time; it was fun to have something the others knew nothing about. Ciara was small and prone to crying, in a way that made her feel to the others like a responsibility and not a burden.
Sal jumped, realizing that he was drifting off the road. He jerked his steering wheel left and reoriented himself with a little slap to his own face. The memories had been so vivid that they had almost literally clouded his vision. With a massive effort, he heaved himself back to his senses long enough to deftly uncap his painkillers with one hand and swallow a couple. Scientifically speaking, this would not help him think more clearly, but Sal hoped that, if there was ever a time for them to have some indirect chain of benefit, it was right then. He had no idea what was happening in his head. In Sal’s mind, a timeline was being drawn, with each point showing the way to the next in succession, like his sight of the road in front of him.
The group’s weekend adventures luxuriated for a few months, and summer became autumn. Once school started again, get-togethers had to be on Saturdays for Emmett’s and Katy’s sakes as well. Manifestly, nothing changed save for the air temperature and the colors of the leaves.
Late into the season, though, and about two-thirds of the way along their circuit, the group detected an anomaly. A storm had raged overnight, and the late morning was misty in the aftermath. Something faintly darker than the pale fog danced at the edge of existence ahead of them. It was floating, in fact. Sal and the others cast looks at each other, but kept on without stopping, drawn to the shape.
As they closed the distance, detail became discernable. The dark thing turned out to be a black sweater, worn on the torso of a man whose kakhied legs had been too hard to see. The man had also seen he was not alone; he approached the children, and they saw his face. He sported a short, neat beard, had very dark and wide eyes, and showed a faint smile at the sight of them. His expression was light but inscrutable.
“It’s not often I see other people on this trail, especially not kids,” he remarked.
“We’re here every Saturday.” That was Emmett, the bravest of the group.
“Ah, well, there you go then. I usually hike on Sundays, but I’m gonna be out of town tomorrow. Figured I’d come early, even though it just stormed. But that’s weird – you kids are out here? Why’s that? Did you get bored of your computers or somethin’?”
“Umm, my mom and dad only let me use the computer for an hour a day,” said Ciara, “and Katy’s only allowed for school stuff.”
“Well, that’s very interesting.”
At that point, Sal felt it best to be brisk about finishing the interaction. “We don’t wanna bother you, sir. We’re just gonna keep going–”
“Oh, don’t let me hold you kids up. But listen, along this part of the path” – the man indicated the route the children normally followed – “a lot of the trees are dead and branches could fall anytime. Especially with all the fog, it could be very dangerous. I’d go a different way if I were you, all right?”
He gave them a nod and a smile, and within seconds, he had vanished back into the mist in the direction the children had come. They looked after him, into the grayness, for some time before anyone spoke.
“Wasn’t he kinda weird?” Sal opened.
“No, why do you think so?” said Emmett.
“He was wearing regular pants, like adults wear to work. What adult would wear those this deep into the forest?”
“Have we ever seen an adult in here before?” asked Katy. “How do we know what they wear in the woods?”
“He must’ve walked an hour to get this far, same as us.” Sal pressed on, never one to let something that bothered him go undiscussed.
Sam looked pensive at that. “There’s a chance he came from the other side. He was walking in the opposite direction as us, after all – maybe he lives beyond the woods, on the far side.”
“That’s dumb, man, nobody lives over there anymore,” said Emmett.
Sam grinned. “Don’t look at me, Sal said that.”
Sal sighed and waved Sam away, then turned in a circle to observe the full scope of his surroundings. “Well, we probably should do what he says, just in case. Let’s go a different way.”
“That’s the only other way…” Ciara pointed out a little gap in the brush about 10 yards ahead of them.
As it turned out, that obscure arm of the main trail grew into an entire dell. Not too far along, a little stream hooked around from one side and started to fill the middle of the valley. The children stuck to the edges and persisted.
After the most arduous woodland journey they had yet undertaken, they beheld a fine reward. Though the valley continued beyond it, they all silently knew their destination was the bridge. It was an infallible, convex fortress with three vast tunnels running through the bottom; the stream spilled through the middle one, but the left and rightmost ones were dry and traversable. A climb up the ridge of the valley to the top of the bridge looked trying, but inviting. It was the Day of Destiny, Sam said.
Sal took a sharp right turn just in time, straining against the steering wheel to keep the car from colliding with a tree trunk. He shook his head, but his mind did not readily surface. Using his remaining wherewithal, he slowed the car to a stop on the side of the road. The deluge in his brain was taking an oddly heavy toll. It was almost as if he was seeing these events unfold for the first time, like he had completely forgotten them – but he knew that was not the case. He had memories of remembering them, years later.
He felt something blossom inside him, a smoking, coagulating bloom.
In that moment, he was all resolve – but a spell of dizziness came over him as quickly, and he had to cradle his head. It was getting to a point where he was not exactly sure what was happening to him, but in fairness, it had been a long night shift and he had not had any stock in over twelve hours.
He considered continuing home and returning the next day, recuperated, but the pull of the bridge was too powerful. He had to experience it right then, that morning, the way he had experienced it before. He detached his seat belt, turned off the assistant just as it asked if he needed help, and elbowed the car door open. The scent of the woods was familiar.
Sal put one foot in front of the other.
The annexation of the bridge was a special thing for immediately graspable reasons, and reasons concealed to the children until later. It stood as a playscape to them from the moment they had found it – a hub for their activities with seemingly endless function. Discovering it also motivated them to learn how to ride bicycles, so as to minimize the issue of how long it took to reach the bridge on foot. Emmett did so, followed by Sal, and then the rest of them in turn; the bridge became the centerpiece of their woods, no longer such a remote demesne.
As time went on, it proved to be even more. The children grew a little older, and though they were still too young to see things this way, the bridge had served as something of a guardian angel to their fellowship. As the children aged, their castle transformed into a mellower hangout, a place where they could simply talk.They learned of nostalgia this way. If not for their bridge, they might have drifted apart completely.
They arrived at thirteen years old, rather refracted versions of themselves from five years before with new pastimes and obligations – their weekly meetings had become bi-weekly, and eventually monthly – but their bridge retreat had managed to anchor them through the years.
In what Sal believed was Year 9, Emmett and Katy found themselves in the same class with the same counselor, so they were able to see each other regularly again. It seemed to reinvigorate the two of them, and for a few weeks that autumn, they facilitated meetups more often.
Which brought the children to a particular October Saturday, evening coming on, their bikes clustered haphazardly around the left drainpipe. They had whiled away the afternoon hours joking and reminiscing about their past adventures. Now they idled, Emmett and Katy doing some kind of assignment, Sam chucking rocks into the stream, and Sal chatting with Ciara.
“I’ve been using more of the equipment lately, my dad’s trying to give me more responsibility,” Sal said the last two words with a wry sternness. “The scythe’s a bitch – I could hardly lift my arms over my head the next day.”
“That’s cool that you get to help more, though. My dad still doesn’t even like that I come here to hang out. He gets, like, angry every time I just go outside.” Ciara said.
“Angry? Does he yell at you?”
“It’s like he gets tense. I mean, he probably thinks I’m gonna get myself hurt or something. Which, that hasn’t happened in years, but still… He definitely wouldn’t even consider letting me help with work. It gets so boring. At least with mom, I help out around the house.”
“Honestly, I get it, but don’t take bodily health for granted. You do have that, even if you don’t have your sanity. Me, I’m legally dead every day when I go to sleep.”
Sam traipsed over to them. “Legally you say? Then in that case, you’re a perpetual money machine and the rest of us can collect daily life insurance payouts?”
Sal gave Sam a light punch on the arm. “It would be helpful to me if you were a perpetual fuck-off machine.”
The three of them laughed, and Emmett looked over from his book and tablet. “Hey, hey – no fun until we’re done working, that’s the deal.”
“Sorry, Mr. Dr. PhD, I forgot you were having trouble with your fractions.” Sal sat down next to Emmett and Katy, inspecting the textbook. He joked, but the contents of such a thing, even at Year 9-level, were mostly lost on him. On one page, there was a series of diagrams of meaty-looking things; they all looked broadly similar, but with certain warped qualities.
“This is for Science. We’re learning about organ compatibility,” said Katy.
Sal leaned closer to read the captions, but Emmett shifted the book closer to himself.
Sam approached with Ciara and said, “If that’s the topic here, let me summarize it for you, Emmett. I researched all this stuff online a couple years ago – I know it all.”
“No, no, I’m good. Just gimme a little while.”
“Genuinely, I could write down all you need to know for a school test – any year – in about five minutes. It’ll save you time, I promise.” Sam reached for the tablet, which displayed Emmett’s typed notes.
“No, man!” Emmett swiped up the tablet. “If they check the fingerprints they’ll see it was you.”
“Why’s that a big deal?” Sal asked.
“They’re just… strict about that. You have to do your own work.”
“What do you mean? I see you and Katy use each other’s tablets sometimes.”
“Oh – that’s different. It’s okay for us since we’re… in the same class.” Emmett met Sal’s gaze with difficulty.
Sal frowned. “But you weren’t in the same class last year, or the year before, and you’ve definitely helped each other with work that entire time.”
“That’s…” Emmett trailed off, and looked at Katy. Kneeling there on the bridge, they held a silent conference, the other three standing in wait. Sal watched with mounting confusion.
With an air of ongoing deliberation, Katy spoke. “Look… You three don’t go there, and that’s why it would be a problem if they saw you’d used our stuff.”
Another silence. She continued, “It’s not important, really – they would just ask questions, and it would be annoying for us, that’s all.”
Sal looked from Katy to Emmett. Ciara faltered on the edge of speech.
“I understand, don’t worry about it.”
Sal spun around. His incomprehension of this situation, which had already been growing uncomfortably, suddenly broke through to angry incredulity when he saw Sam standing there, perfectly at ease.
“What? What do you mean you understand? I don’t! Why would anybody ask questions because I touched their damn tablets?” He turned to Ciara. “Do you know what this is about?”
Ciara still could not find words. Her eyes might have said that she was clueless too… or maybe that she was very surprised he was.
Emmett stood up and took a step toward him. “Look, man, don’t get mad. It’s seriously not a big deal. The counselors ask questions sometimes, that’s all. They’re probably just trying to get new kids to come to the school.”
Sal mulled this information over. He could not have articulated exactly why he was so wary and frustrated, but it was dawning on him how little he had ever asked or heard about Emmett and Katy’s school, despite all the time his two friends had spent working on assignments.
He made a massive effort to keep his voice even. “Ask questions about what, though? And what do you mean, they ‘ask’ questions? Like they’ve asked about us before?”
“Well, everyone has a weekly one-on-one session with their counselor, and they ask how you’ve been doing, you tell them about your personal life…” Emmett paused. “And, y’know, all of us hanging out, I’ve talked about it a few times, obviously. Our counselor, Rose – she’s only asked me who you all are, and if you live around here,” he concluded.
Sal rounded on Katy. “And what about you?”
She took a measured breath. “I haven’t really talked about you that much, mostly the same things as Emmett, and… and she asked me about your parents.” Seeing Sal’s expression, she went on, “I just said they had a farm, all right? And that they were nice. I said the same exact thing about Ciara’s and Sam’s parents.”
Emmett glared at Sal. “There, now will you stop grilling us? Like we said, it’s not a big deal.”
Sal walked to the edge of the bridge and put his hands on the guardrail. The stream below ran lazily, glinting in the low sun; even it was ignoring his consternation. He slapped his hand on the rail and heard the silence behind him deepen. When he turned back, he looked to Ciara, who was frightened, and Sam, who had his back to everyone.
Ciara finally spoke. “Sal, I – I don’t understand this at all. I don’t know why anyone’s asking about us… but I don’t know why you’re so mad either. Should I be mad too?”
Sal raced through everything he had heard. Then, he found Emmett and posed a venomous question. “If it’s really not important, then why did you try so hard not to talk about it?”
With a noticeable grimace Emmett searched for a response, but it was Katy who had one ready. “Because, Salvatore, we knew you’d act this way. We knew we’d have to deal with your insecurity, because you feel like an uneducated loser.”
Sal looked straight into her eyes, like he used to, but now he saw mockery in them. “Oh?” His voice quavered and he tried to harden it. “Did they teach you that about me?”
“Nope, sorry, it’s just so obvious.”
“Katy…” Emmett stepped around to face her. He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it. “Be careful.”
At this, Sal’s insides turned to ice. Over five years’ worth of memories, internal striving, and innocent hope flitted through his head and then fluttered away. In that one moment, all he had had – with both of them – was over, and he intended to slam the door as violently as he could.
“I’ve never met two people I hate more than you. Have fun getting ‘educated’, because I know what’ll happen when you’re done.” Something he had once overheard his father say through the wall suddenly came back to him. “You’ll know the same shit everybody else does, and you’ll be at every possible disadvantage. So have fun with each other.”
He leaned in closer to Katy. “And fuck you, you bitch.”
Turning away, he heard Emmett yell “HEY,” and saw Ciara’s eyes shining with tears while Sam watched him steadily. He stomped toward the guardrail, refusing to show weakness by leaving the scene.
Before he even got there, shame bubbled up inside him, not replacing his fury but mixing horribly with it. He leaned on the rail and hung his head. He had to fight the urge to cry too, having weathered so many blows in such a short time. No matter how much pain he was in, however, he knew that the most important thing was clarifying with Emmett and Katy that the school situation was, in fact, not an issue. He heard murmurs behind him, and then footsteps. He prepared himself to turn back around and face them.
But before he could, he felt a pair of hands push hard against his back. All at once, his world inverted, his legs flailed above him, and his head slammed against the edge of the drainpipe he had just stood over. Black holes and white stars burst before his eyes, and he heard screams and shouts from far away. For one second wind rushed in his ears, and then it was like a giant hammer smashed his back – and suddenly the pain vanished, and he felt the weight of his own body tumbling, dragging him down the bank of the valley. His head ended up at the edge of the stream, a tumult of running water in his left ear while the distant voices persisted in his right.
Moments later, he had a canted, clouded view of Emmett and Katy cycling as fast as they could, away from him. Then, he saw Ciara’s crying face through the wrong end of a telescope, and she mouthed some words to him. She stood up, paced back and forth anxiously a few times, and then sped away on her own bike.
While watching Ciara pedal, Sal knew something was strange, but his failing brain could not think of what. The woods shrank to a pinprick and went dark.
And Sal plodded onward through those woods, years later, his back throbbing again and his head swimming half as much as it had that day. The trek was as laborious an activity as he had attempted in years, but he was feverish in his desire to get back to where he had been. As fragments of his memory fell into place, he could barely pay attention to his surroundings, only absentmindedly swatting the mosquitoes that attacked him.
After five more minutes, his legs started wobbling, but he did not stop. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that if he took a break and lost his forward momentum, it would be a Herculean task to get moving again.
Finally, he made an ungainly turn around a curve in the road and saw a long, straight path ahead, at the end of which – the bridge.
After his fall, Sal found that his period of unconsciousness did not feel like a mere blink of the eyes. When he awoke, he intuited that he had been out for hours, and indeed, after he received his distraught parents’ hugs, a doctor informed him that it was the following morning. He saw tubes and monitors surrounding him, making his already spinning head feel even less settled.
It was explained to him that after he had fainted, he had rolled onto his stomach and intermittently inhaled the water at the edge of the stream. The first thing the doctors had needed to do was drain the water from his lungs and inspect potential damage to his brain. It had been difficult to measure the neurological effect of the water, though, as Sal had sustained a concussion too, from hitting his head on the drainpipe. Still, once Sal woke up and seemed able to think and speak cogently, the doctors were optimistic that there would be no lasting impairment; whatever mild fog was in Sal’s brain was just the temporary result of the concussion.
The injury to Sal’s back quickly became more pressing. Three of his thoracic vertebrae had been knocked severely out of place when he hit the ground, causing a spinal fluid leak. Fortunately, there was a surgical procedure and a series of injections that, the doctors informed him, would have a good chance of setting him right, opening the door to physical therapy and a full recovery – if they acted quickly.
Sal’s parents were shown illustrations of what the surgery would entail, and Sal caught a glimpse of three syringes on a page: a beige liquid in the first, a clear liquid in the second, and a silvery-blue, opaque liquid in the third. Medical equipment, very uncommon in his life up to that point, disconcerted him, but the choice between a little invasive treatment and the possibility of never walking again was no choice at all.
Four weeks later, he struggled to his father’s car with a walker, having been told that he was extremely lucky. As long as it had taken for him to arrive at the hospital, the doctors had not expected such success.
Sal’s parents had said nothing about the events of finding him in the woods, save for the fact that his friend Ciara had shown up at their door in a panic to tell them. Likewise, Sal had said nothing about how he had fallen. They all saved these discussions for when Sal returned home.
His mother immediately asked him what had happened, implying that she wanted the whole truth this time. For those weeks in his hospital bed, Sal had agonized over the prospect of telling the truth about the fall to anyone. He was both desperate to talk about it and, simultaneously, could hardly manage to face it himself. In the end, his answer came out as an admittance that he and his friends had been in a heated argument, but that he had fallen by accident in his fervor.
She probed at the reason for the argument. Sal was still worried that, on the day in question, he had touched upon secrets too serious not to divulge, so he told his parents everything he could remember about the conversation that preceded the fall. They contemplated the information for a while, but to Sal’s surprise, advised him not to worry about anything his friends had said – what he had described was common in schools and did not indicate anything dubious. This assurance took the edge off Sal’s concern, but an amount of suspicion remained – not to mention even greater confusion.
One thing that came across clearly to his parents was the bitterness toward his friends he now harbored. He voiced his determination to never see Emmett and Katy again, no matter how little the argument supposedly mattered, no matter how much shame Sal had felt right after it ended. At this sentiment, his mother wore an expression of heartbreak that Sal could picture in his mind for years after.
In truth, he felt resentment toward all of his friends, not just Emmett and Katy. Given the circumstances, he had expected a visit – an acknowledgement of his existence – from Ciara, or possibly Sam, and yet his month in the hospital had yielded none. The infuriating silence continued after Sal came home and began his rehabilitation in earnest. Over the following six months as he learned to walk without aid again, he could do nothing but simmer, pondering the most plaguing question left to him: who had pushed him over the side of the bridge?
Emmett, his best friend, the most obvious answer. Especially if he and Katy had become romantically involved, Sal’s impulsive vitriol toward Katy easily could have set him off. And yet, that day, Katy herself had displayed vindictiveness that Sal never knew existed in her – a side of her that it had crushed him to behold. And Sam, who had always been an enigma, but never more than that day…
Ciara was the only one he wanted to trust, and she refused to contact him. Though he could have gone directly to her house and demanded to see her, mulishness kept him from doing so.
As he recovered, he took to eavesdropping on his parents at doors whenever he could, determined to find out if they were having hushed conversations. He waited for any sign that they were more perturbed by his story than they let on, but none came.
What Sal did not need to hunt for was the general strain his condition put on his father. Sal had been slated from birth to assist with farmwork as he grew, and eventually take it over – he had always been content with that fate and had even taken pride in it as he reached adolescence. But as remarkable as Sal’s recovery had been, it was not miraculous enough that he could resume the physical labor to which he had become accustomed. His father had already been on the old side when Sal had been born; now he was in his late fifties and his efforts were no longer buttressed by his son’s. Sal’s mother could only do so much to help. Sal’s father grew increasingly irritable and baggy-eyed as the months elapsed, and sometimes Sal thought he was staying up all night.
One year after Sal’s injury, the farm became unmanageable. His parents sold their property for just enough to buy a smaller house thirty minutes away. His father got two new jobs at two separate corner stores to feed his wife and son, and another year after that, he was dead. With barely any time to process the loss, Sal and his mother found themselves compelled to find work, and Sal was limited to those jobs he could physically handle. That was how, after jumping from one temp position to the next for some time, Sal ended up as an editor at a local news station. Despite having no background in the field, he impressed his employers by volunteering to take nighttime blocks.
It also came to pass that Sal required follow-up treatment on his spine every year. His back began to pain him significantly in the months leading up to these treatments, and although the appointments themselves were unpleasant, he looked forward to them for the weeks of relative bliss afterward.
He supposed that was why, by his late teenage years, the purpose of his daily life had been reduced to chasing painlessness. When a coworker asked him to attend a get-together of similarly aged people, it was the most exciting day he could remember having in years, not just because the occasion simulated friendship for him, but also because it was essentially a drug circle. A nameless twenty-something who was there that night told Sal that such events had been popping up regularly in the area, usually in a new spot at the edge of the woods each time. It did not take long for Sal to seek them out so he could inject some melted-down alleviative cocktail rather than suffer the ineffectual painkillers he had historically taken.
If these drug-fueled, clandestine meetups with other people his age had a net-negative effect on Sal, he was not capable of recognizing it. He knew using them as a crutch was “bad” for a litany of obvious reasons, and yet he believed that the opportunity to socialize, even inauthentically, was healthier for him in the long run. For a while, endless night shifts at the station and mellow weekends with a revolving door of pitiable young adults composed his life. Sal’s mother may have suspected what he was doing on his New Saturdays, but she lacked the energy to confront him about it.
On one Saturday night, Sal sat on the grass alone, a remnant of a dispersed circle of acquaintances. He tried to enjoy the feeling of warm numbness before it broke in the middle of his back and pooled in his limbs, then faded completely. His gaze swept the milling people in front of him, the street on his left – but as he focused on the crumbling road, he heard an approaching car’s engine. Soon lights appeared, growing bigger and brighter until they stopped on the roadside. Sal perceived a handful of arrivals against the night sky. Each person was illuminated momentarily by the ambient glow around the headlights – a couple of nondescript young men went by, and then, at the back of the group, a blond boy’s face with sunken cheeks came into view.
A force that circumvented his conscious mind brought Sal to his feet and pushed him to pursue this group. He knew whom he had just seen. The face was different, owing to both age and what looked like malnourishment, but it was him.
Ten yards away, Sal stopped. He realized he had not seen any of them in over six years, and recalled the conditions of their separation. What would he even say? The truth was, he did not even know what he wanted from that long-unresolved situation. Vengeance? Mere closure? The question made him feel a paralysis almost like that which he avoided at thirteen years old. Yet the person who stood in front of him was, at this point, undoubtedly the least daunting of his childhood friends to approach. Sal would not have another opportunity like this. With calculated insouciance, he inserted himself into the group of people before him.
“Hey… Sam?” He locked eyes with the gaunt blond boy. Sal looked at him for a while – nobody else around them mattered.
For a second, he thought Sam did not recognize him, or had decided to pretend not to. Finally, he spoke. “Are you Sal? Did I know you years ago?”
“That’s right. Sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to say hi.”
“Never a problem, Sal, it’s good to see you.” They shook hands. “If you’re here, I take it you imbibe in the same unsavory pleasures we do?”
And Sal spent the rest of the night with this group – for the sake of its three other members, he introduced himself formally and made perfunctory conversation, but he barely cared if they saw through his shallow politeness. He prodded Sam with statements and inquiries, advancing on the topic of his fall with the care he would a lion, never quite reaching it. He retained little of what Sam told him about his life – he had become an archivist for a library, or maybe it was a museum, and enjoyed discussing the documents he perused day to day. Sal retaliated by elaborating on his unexceptional job, hinting at the fact that it was not his planned line of work, but backing down before getting any more overt.
He began to think this skittish conversation would live and die as it was. Then, just when he was considering excusing himself for home, the three other members of their party left for a piss, or some other quick excursion.
And the two of them were alone. They remained silent for a time, and then –
“I have to say, I feel bad,” Sam said.
“…Feel bad? Why’s that?” Sal looked pointedly at Sam.
“I feel bad that you’ve ended up here, at such a sordid social occasion.”
Sal leaned forward on the grass. “Well, you’re here too. Do you feel bad for yourself?”
“No, not particularly. I couldn’t have imagined anything else for myself.”
“So, what – you expected better of me?”
Sam considered the question. “In all honesty, I couldn’t answer that.”
The conversation flickered out, and the two sat there. Sam was at ease, as he never failed to be. Sal stared at him, willing him to say more, but he would not. Eventually, Sal was the one who broke the silence.
“Y’know… You were nothing like me.”
Sam looked up.
“When we were kids, you always made a joke of pretending to be me. But you don’t look or act anything like me. You never did.”
At that, Sam gazed around at the trees, formulating his response carefully. At last, he said, “You’re not wrong. It was a feeble joke. And yet, on a very deep level, there was something to it. We’re both here right now, when nobody else from our old group of friends is.”
Sal opened his mouth, not sure exactly how to respond – but just then, their current companions returned and sat back down. The conversation had only gotten personal when he and Sam were alone, and somehow, it felt like it could only be so under that condition. The moment slipped away.
An hour later, they all stood and got ready to depart, Sam’s friends likely pleased to be rid of their unexpected guest. Sal shared another look with his old friend as they said goodbye, and for a second the request of Sam’s phone number, or some other means of contacting him, almost came out of his mouth. Then, he took in the sickly blond face, and it registered that he could be looking at the person who ruined his life with a mere push.
He said, “Hope I see you around at these things.”
Sam chuckled. “If that’s what you want, then I hope so too.”
Seven years on from that night, and it had never happened again.
Sal’s racing memory met back up with the present as he passed the trees and stepped onto the bridge. It was like coming up for air. Even the dead, dull version of his childhood sanctuary, complete with crumbling road, dried-up stream, and bare trees, was the vividest thing in the world to him right then – so much so that he had to steady himself against another dizzy spell.
He spurred himself onward, one step at a time, until he planted his feet at the paint-chipped railing overlooking the leftmost drainpipe. For years, he had ranged across a world he did not understand, unwittingly arriving at this exact spot, the fulcrum of his life. This place was of some import, he knew. He had known, somewhere, since he lay eyes on it at eight years old. Today, his mind was not playing tricks on him – it was testing the boundaries of its prison in hopes that today was the day it would finally escape deceit.
Sal’s instincts pulled him away from his perch. He drifted back to the end of the bridge whence he emerged, but rather than follow the road to his car, he picked up a leaden leg and clambered over the guardrail, onto the steep bank of the valley. Graceless and slow, but at least on his feet this time, Sal made his way down the slope. His world tilted more with each step, and he closed his eyes periodically to reorient himself.
Finally, his feet came upon level terrain. Sal gazed at the damp ground, where a tiny trickle of water struggled along. He had sudden visions of his own insides churning through liquids as slowly as they would tar. Blinking forcefully, he started moving again. It was then that he noticed how truly pestilential the mosquitoes had become in this basin. He felt them speckling his skin every few inches and could hardly brush them off.
He staggered away from the base of the bridge to see the structure from a distance, as he had the first time. He stepped into the muddy water, not even feeling the wetness soaking into his shoes, and turned. The great brick construction stood before him, and he saw into the three tunnels that penetrated it – directly out the other end of the middle one, which was in the center of his vision. Sal realized that, for all their dominance over this bridge as children, he and his friends had never actually set foot inside the middle pipe due to the deep water that had always run through it.
His feet carried him toward this uncharted territory. He could see the pale sky among the trees out the end of the tunnel, the white light exposing ancient, slimy residue coating the pipe’s interior. Everything was grayscale to Sal’s eyes and approaching smoothly, like a dolly shot in an old film.
And then he stopped, just outside the pipe’s mouth, and looked down at his two hands. Promptly, a fat mosquito floated up to him and landed on his right one. It unsheathed the fine point of its mouth and stabbed skin, sucking up a feast. Sal could see it eyeing him malevolently, daring him to squash it, but somehow he kept his hand still as stone. The bug’s abdomen inflated into a dark red balloon, and then it detached itself from Sal, free to go. It bobbed away, heavy with its fill, looking for a place to land and rest while Sal watched it, careful not to lose it. Then, mid-flight, the insect lost height – gradually at first, and then nosediving like a plane. It landed densely on the mud right at the mouth of the drainpipe, where it crawled for a moment, each step a violent twitch. Soon, its legs sank and it went still.
And its countless brothers buzzed, their symphony approaching a crescendo, and Sal felt the imminence of something. His soul was black, his heart corroded, everything hurt – he could turn around now to face the flames licking his back and repay the world in kind, or step forward off the face of the Earth.
He entered the cavern.
Behind the gray sky, the sun was snuffed out, and natural ambient light dimmed to blackness. The dark was so deep it was like a solid object, thick folds of cloth that Sal could grab, but as soon as it had come, it gave way to glowing impressions of all colors, shapes, and sizes, looming, emerging, bursting all around – fire rain from purple clouds, blood dripping from metal, stars flickering like torches in the sky and shooting like lasers. Then grain distorted his vision, and the air itself was insects, but breathable, even fresh. Was this inside the tunnel?
New images appeared – rows on both sides, stretching to infinity, of men standing tall, uniformed in black and beige. They urged Sal forward, deeper into the nothingness. He moved his legs and it was like he walked underwater, but his breathing tapped into his very deepest reserves of energy, enabling him to continue. The men beside him insisted, demanded, that Sal finish the journey he had started. Nothing else mattered anymore – his wounds, his friends, his parents – they had brought him here. He felt it to be true. But why?
In answer, each identical onlooker’s mouth moved in unison.
To foreshadow the conclusion is to secure it.
You are but the first and last piece of a puzzle.
A final, watershed step out the other end. The world exploded in white light around him once more. Through his streaming eyes, he discerned a figure, and everything made sense.